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The Opinion Pages

Transgender Lives: Your Stories

As part of a series of editorials about transgender experiences, we are featuring personal stories that reflect the strength, diversity and challenges of the community. Welcome to this evolving collection.

The Opinion Pages

Micah

Transgender advocatefrom San Francisco

I once asked myself, “when will my transition be complete?”

As someone who identifies as non-binary —neither male nor female— this seemed impossible. How could my journey ever be over if I could never physically, socially, or legally attain my goals? I could not envision what an end state would look like, much less how I would get there.

Everything I’ve done with my body, from top surgery to gradual low-dose testosterone to a hysterectomy, was, at some point, a revelation. After I’d discover that these procedures even existed, I then had to determine how to access these services. In 2010, transgender health standards were on the brink of change; however, they still omitted any mention of people not fitting into a binary gender. Thus, people like me were technically “disqualified” from transitioning.

Achieving a middle ground physically has been easy compared to the social realm. For years I agonized over pronouns: he or she, they or zie? All of them sounded awkward, none of them represented me. If I could change my pronouns, I could certainly change my name, which had started to feel as ill-fitting as some of my former body parts. At least some names are gender-ambiguous. And despite only two options to choose from, I opted for a legal gender transition as the lesser of two wrongs.

There has been no transition template for me to follow; I’ve had to make it up as I go along. My gender does not exist in a society that only has room for male and female. From clothing to vitamins, passports to bathrooms, I don’t see my gender, my identity - me - anywhere.

While medical guidelines now acknowledge a spectrum of gender - that not every transgender person is a man or a woman - genderqueer identities are still cloaked in invisibility. Articles may pay lip service to those who are “in-between” (though reality is far more colorful), stories generally portray a linear narrative of someone going from point A to point B. Yet my destination isn’t pre-determined; my story remains unwritten.

Nowadays, wrapping up the loose ends seems more of an exercise in paperwork than self-reflection. I’m much more sure now of the path I’m taking. I feel I’ve made not only tremendous progress, but that I’m certainly closer to the finish. What that looks like I still don’t know, but—as with everything in life—nobody knows.